I'm a little frustrated with today's entry, mainly because I haven't had time to think things through. This is one of the great frustrations of the combination of parenthood/studenthood that is my life.

A couple of days ago there was a short article in the New York Times on how a Beethoven manuscript sold for $2 million. The price was not quite a record, but was still respectable enough to put it in the price grouping with great visual art auctions.

Manuscript studies has a long and illustrious history in the field of musical scholarship. Many types of things can be learned from handwritten music, including how pieces were put together and arranged (some were orchestrated by the composer, others were not), how drafts were put together (i.e. how a composer goes about his business), dissemination history (as in chant studies, looking at variants to determine how a given piece might have been passed around a wide region), etc. But I find myself wondering how this kind of iconic scholarship will play as we move into the era of computerized notation. Programs like Finale and Sibelius are now the norm. Before graduate school, I did a lot of gigging in pit orchestras for musical theater groups. One of the things I loved about the music is that it was rarely, if ever, typeset. In almost all cases, you were looking at the work of a professional copyist.

Copyists are a dying breed. I used to work for an orchestra that still used a hand copyist. He was in his 80s. But he�d worked with an amazing array of musicians in his life. There�s something about looking at a well-copied part, even if it�s not in the hand of the composer, that to me, as a musician, implies a character that printed music will never have. I like the visually artistic side of looking at the music too. If you play a lot of musical theater, you soon realize that you start to recognize the hand of your favorite copyists and look forward to working with them again, like old friends. You also soon learn which ones to trust (i.e. they never make mistakes) and which ones will leave you high and dry.

It�s a little too soon to tell what the effect of Finale and Sibelius and the like will be in the long run. There are some definite positives, of course. Scores tend to have fewer errors these days, as mistakes are far easier to correct. And for those of us with poor handwriting skills, our scores can look infinitely better. It puts the ability to typeset one�s own work within the capability of most composers, giving them a greater ability to control the version of their work that goes out to the public. There are pedagogical advantages too. Pieces can be scanned or typed in and easily transposed, at the touch of a button, to whatever key is necessary � a distinct advantage over handwritten musical theater scores. As orchestra manager for a summer stock theater company, I spent many late nights copying out transpositions. Today they would happen almost instantly, and with much greater accuracy. For the keyboard impaired, music software programs can also create recorded versions of the music on the page. It may not be pretty, but it can be helpful to the performer attempting to learn a new and difficult piece and even to the composer who can�t get her hands around her own score to make sure what�s on the page is really what she hears in her head.

What remains undetermined, though, is how the computerization of musical notation will affect our sense of a composer�s work and worth. I find it hard to believe that scores in Finale, even if notated by the composers, will be examined with quite the same care as a handwritten manuscript. There is a sense of a loss of one mode of artistic quality.

There is also the potential loss of drafts. Many, if not most, of the composers I know don�t actually compose at the computer. They handwrite things first then copy them over. So a draft copy still remains. But what of those who do compose at the computer, a tribe that is likely to be expanding as the younger generation, trained earlier on the music software programs, takes over? Unless they save each version, any record of the compositional process is lost. To many composers, this may seem like an advantage, the erasure of imperfections. But draft studies are fascinating and offer a window into an activity that can seem truly mysterious.

I also wonder if, at some point, the nature of the mechanics of copying will begin to affect the nature of composition. I think, for example, of scores by composers such as George Crumb, works of visual as well as musical art that could never, at least as far as I could imagine, be created on a computer.

Everyone can own Beethoven. In the same way, of course, everyone can own Picasso, but with Picasso ownership (via postcard or Art History book), there is, I think, an understanding that the reproduction is not the real thing. It is inauthentic.

With classical music (above other forms of music where the performance is understood to be different than that on a printed page or may even not include a written form at all, eg jazz and rock), the term authentic can apply equally to live and canned music. Forms with spectacle (opera, musical theater) as part of the equation still retain an urgency about live performance. But what about chamber music? Or an orchestral performance? One of my former graduate school colleagues, himself a composer, once told me he can hardly stand to go to concerts anymore, because his ears have become so accustomed to recorded perfection. That makes me incredibly sad.

Where does the authentic document lie? Is it in the manuscript, the museum artifact?

Is it in the �historically authentic� performance? What place does it leave for creative interpretation which takes its inspiration from something outside of history?

The question of interpretation is a difficult one. Not only can everyone own Beethoven, but everyone can own an array of interpretations thereof. I myself have at least three different recordings of his symphonies, not to mention recordings of Liszt�s piano arrangements of them.

Music is (with the rare exception of the composer who writes for himself alone to play) by definition a collaborative venture in a way that art is not. That has hitherto been part of the definition of its performance and community within performance organizations, professional ones as well as amateur, is usually a high priority. In a musical community that raises the performing or interpretive genius to cult status, how can we afford to also put a premium on historical accuracy? There is not much room to move in the middle.

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